Lady Bird, a trio comprising of Alex Deadman (guitar), Joe Walker (drums) and Dan Bird (vocals), hail from Kent and have been hitting the scene with fast anarchic punk since 2016. This is a band with a decent sense of humour, and more than a nod toward the Ian Dury style of hitting out a story. With debut album ‘WE’, set for release February 25th via Alcopop! Records (Pulled Apart By Horses, The Subways, Tigercub), singer Dan Bird spent some time with us to talk all things Lady Bird.
We are talking as the advance single from the album “Bludsuckers,” complete with fast on the nail drums and delicious punk riffs, hits the airwaves and the video release sees the band in vampiric mood playing in church. Starting with the video, Dan says he’d watched the old Dracula movies on television, and got them more now than he ever used to. Dracula was an early interest:
“but skateboarding was another that consumed me for years, I still dream about it…when I can I have a go. I was actually sat with one of the young lads who filmed all the skate footage in the video, that was him in St Albans – and we were doing a show there recently and I looked over at this enormous Cathedral over the road from where we were playing…and I remembered this skate park…and I was thinking…let’s do a funny video in a church with a vampire. And even though vampires and churches aren’t really related, and I said it to Jude Harrison, our photographer, and it all came to fruition.”
Its great, of course that we can show an idea can really come to be from a suggestion. Lady Bird make some great videos, there’s one link with this article for the new one, but if you like this have a look at ‘Factory Fool‘ as well. This is a band cutting its own path and gaining interest from radio stations and national news. Things come around and Dan spoke of how genre in music comes around, with each genre having so many seats at the table. But interest in punk remains high and Lady Bird auditioned for the new Danny Boyle film that is coming round, ‘Pistol‘ on the Sex Pistols. Dan is a Freddie Mercury fan and we both hope that the ‘Pistol’ movie does for punk what ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ did for Queen (“and what a blessing that was”). Hopefully the movie will lead to a surge of interest in punk. “I hope for a revival in hip-hop too, that true hip-hop makes an emergence too. We have to remember that jazz, hip-hop and punk are siblings because they all originated within a decade of each other in New York…”
As far as the band,
“We as a band, we started as me and Alex. I was moving on from being a drummer to being a singer songwriter and I was trying to find people that I wanted to be in a band with. But it was all new, I was stepping away from the drums into the singing role. First Alex and I, he has so much fire; and Joe has fire in him too, an insane energy. We have worked on so many projects together with the band….but Joe has so much energy. We are both interested in Buddhism and read around it,, and we have built a recording studio together.”
It was great chatting to Dan. The band went on tour with Slave, going around Europe and building up a following. Then along came Lockdown and we all had challenges for a time,
“I lost my voice for nearly two years (after an operation on his vocal chords) , and the others had to cover vocals for a time, and we all have issues to deal with…so the album has the title WE, ironic for so many reasons…”
This is a band with a really positive, exciting, vibe around it. The ladybird is not flying home, but spreading its wings and looking for a much bigger stage.
Mark C. Chambers.
